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Is the press treating Apple differently without Steve Jobs?

Apple isn’t the same company without Steve Jobs at the helm, but that’s easy to forget when looking at the company’s financial performance since its co-founder and chief visionary passed last year.

Despite questions about Apple’s ability to thrive long-term without Jobs, consumers continue to snap up the company’s latest and greatest products at remarkable, record-breaking rates.

But that doesn’t mean that a subtle shift in the way some parts of the media are treating Apple hasn’t become noticeable.

Take, for instance, the hubbub over Apple’s tax avoidance strategy. It made the cover of The New York Times this past Sunday, with the Times’ Charles Duhigg and David Kocieniewski choosing to use the world’s richest software company as an example of how “technology giants have taken advantage of tax codes written for an industrial age and ill suited to today’s digital economy.”

Combine the subjects of tax and multinational corporations and you have the makings of a dinner conversation that can fast become heated depending on the company you keep, but this isn’t the real story here.

The real story is the fact that Apple’s tax strategy is nothing new. AllThingsDigital’s Arik Hesseldahl points out that he wrote about Apple’s tax strategy a full six years ago in BusinessWeek. The Times story, he says, contains a lot of “old news.”

So what gives? While it could be argued that Apple is a target simply because times are tough for governments and Apple has reached astonishing levels of success, it’s also hard not to think that some of the more recent discussions around Apple that casts the company in a more negative light — from its suppliers’ treatment of their workers to the company’s tax strategies — are easier to push because one of the most respected and enigmatic innovators of the past century is no longer the living face of Apple.

Fair or not, Apple should get used to it because while it’s clear that Tim Cook is quite comfortable being the man in charge at Apple, his company isn’t likely to get nearly as many breaks from the press going forward.

When mobile or tablet design is executed well, the device feels like the extension of our bodies. Because interfaces respond even before we consciously give them a command.

Often, the interface “dissolves in behavior” and we feel empowered, as though the device we hold in our hand is the equivalent of Iron Man’s suit of cybernetic armor, or Batman’s utility belt.

I call this empowering experience a “Magic Moment”.

Most importantly, these “Magic Moments” make people fall in love with your app, show it to their friends, telling, nay, insisting they download the app and experience the magic for themselves. These are the moments we designers live for.

And mobile and tablet devices are more suited to creating and fostering “magic moments” than any other device.

Software is a multi-billion dollar industry but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t changed dramatically in the past several years. From the rise of the app store to software-as-a-service, how software is bought and sold has been evolving rapidly.

That creates both opportunity and challenges for software’s biggest players.

According to a newly-published study published by Pew, nearly three-quarters of Facebook users polled said they didn’t know that Facebook generates and stores data about their interests and traits, and, when they came to learn this, over half indicated that they were uncomfortable with Facebook’s practice.

Mastercard, the third-largest credit card processor in the US, has announced a new policy that will make it more difficult for some businesses to automatically convert free trials into recurring subscriptions.